Elements and Elegance: Fifty Years

Large numbers for Strunk and White’s little “The Elements of Style”: fifty years, ten million copies sold. 2005 saw an illustrated edition, and now there’s an anniversary edition. “The Elements of Style for Dog Lovers” in 2015? We can only hope.

That a manual written by a college professor—William Strunk, Jr.—for his English class, and then added to by one of his students—E. B. White—should thrive and be the object of reverence of notables from S. E. Hinton to Dan Rather, is rather remarkable.

There are doubters, of course, grammar swots. Geoffrey Pullum, the head of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that English syntax “is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.”

Too harsh. My quibble is minor, and comes on the very first page of rules. We’re told in all cases to “form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ’s.” I.e., “Charles’s.” Yet exceptions are to be made for “ancient proper names ending in -es and -is.” Thus, “Moses’.” “Jesus” gets the same treatment. Why? (No, really, why?)

I’ve known writers to show an implicit condescension towards Strunk and White’s rigid prescriptions, a sense that we more expansive intellects don’t always have to hew the line. Even White, who after all was amending an extant text, gently admits that he doesn’t follow the rules all the time, and Chapter V, written by White after Strunk’s death, carves out space for eccentric syntax and expression.

Language and grammar are living things, we argue. Why should we be constrained by arbitrary dictates that cement us in a long-past cultural and linguistic moment? So we don’t look like fools, is the answer. There are a few writers who have great success skiing off-piste, but most of us, as Strunk wrote, “will probably do best to follow the rules.”